Saw people talking in comments at several places now, expressing animosity towards them to say the least, always presented as something that everyone seems to know about.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    had to release Steamboat Willy into public domain.

    Not even remotely comparable.

    Code isnt something publicly accessible in the first place. You cant force a company to make a private thing become public, and I mean that in the literal sense of “this wasn’t something outside people could even see

    Because, to do so, you’d have to first force the company to keep their internal copy of it archived, which you also can’t force them to do.

    If a few years later you go “You have to publish this source code now” and the company goes “We don’t even have that around anymore, it doesnt exist” wtf are you gonna do about it? It’s been deleted, and it was never publicly accessible in the first place, so you have no idea what it even was or looked like.

    As a result, you can’t force anything about it, it literally doesnt even exist anymore, so you can’t travel back in time and make the company undo that.

    • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      Because, to do so, you’d have to first force the company to keep their internal copy of it archived, which you also can’t force them to do.

      Of course you can. See documentation of business transactions for tax audits.

      Also, it’s not like companies lose their code binaries while the game servers are still up and running. And it’s not like the code gets thrown out the window as soon as the servers go down or something.

      Bro, you are both strawmanning the shit out of this and have no idea on what the fuck you’re talking about. You should stop eating corporate propaganda and be happy that there are people trying to work against corporate greed.

      • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        See documentation of business transactions for tax audits.

        Yeah… no.

        You can’t compare taxes which involve transactions with the outside world, and are arguably the most important thing the government cares about, to the source code of some shitty mobile game that got made 5 years ago or whatever.

        If you genuinely tried to make a law in your country that tech companies are legally required to preserve all their source code for games forever, do you know what would actually happen?

        Your country’s entire game industry would quickly dry up because that’s an incredibly stupid thing to try and ask.

        Companies aren’t gonna sit and audit their developers git history commits for some mobile game or random steam release.

        And, if you have any concept of how git or other forms of source control for games works, you’d also know that basic day to day operations would, potentially violate such a law, depending on interpretation.

        And no company will wanna incur that risk so they will just avoid your country cuz it’s law was written by someone with clearly zero understanding of how source control works.

        Classic example of gamers demanding stupid stuff with zero clue about the actual implementation details of what they are asking for.